How to restore corrupted Plesk permissions and ownership on RedHat based systems

Question

Someone accidentally executed chown and chmod commands on Plesk installation directory. How to restore the permissions and ownerships to what they are supposed to be?

Answer

Warning: This guide is applicable only for RHEL/CentOS/CloudLinux systems.

Connect to the server using SSH. Permissions and ownerships can be reset to their default settings using the following commands:

# for p in $(rpm -qa | egrep "psa|plesk"); do rpm --setugids $p; done
# for p in $(rpm -qa | egrep "psa|plesk"); do rpm --setperms $p; done
# chown root.psaadm /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mod_wrapper

Note: The order in which you execute the commands is important. When changing permissions and ownerships on files, always change the ownerships first, and then the permissions. Otherwise, if the files have a SUID bit set, for example, it (the bit set) may get cleared.

Additional Information

Sometimes Mailman still fails to work after applying the above solution. The following messages can be found in the /var/log/maillog:

CONFIG_TEXT: qmail: 1342049843.229677 delivery 3: deferral: Uh-oh:_.qmail_file_is_writable._(#4.7.0)/
qmail: 1342049843.229737 status: local 4/10 remote 1/20

There are 3 possible ways of resolving it:

1. Run following set of commands:

   # rpm --setugids mailman-<INSTALLED_VERSION>
   # rpm --setperms mailman-<INSTALLED_VERSION>

   Replace <INSTALLED_VERSION> with the actual version of Mailman package installed on your server.

2. Try switching mail provider to Postfix and check if the behavior changes.

3. Try uninstalling Mailman (Warning, this will lead to loss of all configuration), install it back and configure it anew.

   In case all those action do not help, make sure that Plesk installation is up-to-date. Update it if necessary.